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Publisher Benjamin “Buddy” Bess, left, and director David DeLuca are diversifying Bess Press while remaining true to its core business — books about Hawaii. “We are decentralizing as an opportunity to grow,” DeLuca says.

Chad Blair

Pacific Business News

“Peppo’s Pidgin to the Max” has been Bess Press’s best-seller for the nearly three decades it has been in print.

The local classic ($10.95) on Hawaiian Creole English by authors Ken Sakata and Pat Sasaki and illustrator Douglass Simonson has spawned several sequels and knockoffs. Bess Press also sells word-a-day calendars and refrigerator word-magnet versions (“magnets fo’ da icebox”), both $9.95.

David DeLuca, Bess Press’s director, said www.besspress.com may soon offer a “Pidgin to the Max” audio pronunciation feature as well to spur online sales.

Can an animated Pidgin smart-phone “app” be far off?

“We intend to use the Web page as a store window,” said DeLuca, who started at Bess Press less than four years ago as a receptionist and helping out in the warehouse. “It will include video profiles of some of our authors and other interactive features. The Web allows a more intimate experience to get to know us as a publisher.”

The Web also is the portal for developing digital content that can be read on electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s nook, Sony’s Reader, and a soon-to-be-revealed device from Apple.

“David and I were just in Frankfurt for the annual book mart, and the buzz was about e-books,” said publisher Benjamin “Buddy” Bess. “Keep in mind that publishing is a $600 billion industry and e-books are only between $70 million and $90 million. But it’s the future of publishing, and we don’t want to just give content away.”

Bess Press has had a successful run in the local book-publishing business since 1979.

With a catalog heavy on Hawaiiana — Spam and pupu cookbooks, ghost stories and legends, surfers and musicians, children’s and coloring books — it has enjoyed gross annual sales of between $1 million and $2 million since 2003.

But the publishing business is in transition, and Bess Press is diversifying to capitalize on technology and trends.

It includes adding spring-roller, mounted wall maps that sell for $169, and converting a section of the Bess Press office and warehouse on Harding Avenue into an event space to promote book releases, readings and film showings.

Two events were held last month, including the premiere screening of DeLuca’s environmental film “Huliau.”

And, Bess Press will continue to search for out-of-print books that can be updated and made relevant for new audiences. A recent example: “The Japanese in Hawaii: Okage Sama De” by Dorothy Ochiai Hazuma and Jane Okamoto Komeiji, previously published in 1986.

Bess Press also is adding to its educator’s catalog, which includes histories of Hawaii, American Samoa and the Republic of the Marshall Islands and a series of 14 illustrated island alphabet books. The alphabet books, produced in collaboration with the nonprofit Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, include ones in the Yapese, Pohnpeian, Chamorro and Chuukese languages.

“Our present emphasis is two-thirds trade or general titles and one-third titles with an educational focus, but the long-term goal is more educational materials,” Bess said. “The key to success is to have a focus, a niche.”

“He’s played around with the one-offs — on UH football, the Spam cookbooks, the Pidgin materials — but it is his educational and trade reading material on Hawaii and the Pacific that have been the core materials and the most beneficial,” said Maile Meyer, owner of Native Books/Na Mea Hawaii, who has worked with Bess as an author, consultant, distributor and seller of his titles.

“It takes a while for anyone not from here to get what this place is all about, but he has,” Meyer said. “He has really made a contribution.”

Bess, 62, came to Hawaii in 1976 after working in the publishing business on the East Coast. His wife, Ann Rayson, had a job offer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (where Rayson, an English professor, will retire this year). Rayson also has written for Bess Press, including “Modern History of Hawaii.”

As a local representative for Mainland publishers, Bess visited all the public schools in Hawaii, developing contacts. The 1978 Constitutional Convention mandated the teaching of Hawaiian history, culture and language, and Bess saw an opportunity.

“It was the Hawaiian Renaissance, the time of the Hokulea and Kahoolawe,” Bess said, referring to the revival of ancient Hawaiian voyaging techniques and the struggle over land rights. “I was feeling the pulse beat at the grass-roots level.”

Bess already had begun to downsize his operations, reducing staff size from 15 to seven and ending distribution.

“I got out of distribution before the economy went south because the margins were narrow,” he said. “But my heart also wasn’t in it. It took away from the mission to publish books.”

Today, the mission increasingly involves DeLuca, 27, a Cleveland native who shares with Bess a fondness for Italy.

“We often see things from different perspectives, but we are a team and share the same end goal, a unique imprint of books,” DeLuca said. “We are decentralizing as an opportunity to grow.”

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